Introduction
Participants in the Political Aesthetics of Power and Protest workshop at the University of Warwick and others alert to the importance of aesthetics in politics are looking at emotion in politics and how it is so effectively harnessed for political purposes through art.
The state needs the discipline of that smooth consistency, which is embedded in national culture and is displayed through the aesthetics both of everyday rituals and hyper-visible ceremonies, of flags and the ceremonies to unfurl or take them down, of art reflecting the political imaginations of the state elites.
However, political imaginaries are not just those of the powerful, of course. Equally important are the ways in which the aesthetics of power are employed in everyday objects of use, such as calendars, leisure, film, museums and public displays of art, and modes of communication such as humour and vulgarity, ‘the grotesque’ as Achille Mbembe has called it. Aesthetics has developed across these historical boundaries not in any linear way but through struggles of and for meanings and also through reciprocity and intercultural dialogue.
So, aesthetics does several things in political life. First, political imaginaries represented in and through aesthetic production generate both cognitive and affective responses which are expressed in terms of history, the present as well as future aspirations. The excavation and representation of time is not innocent; social and political relations are reproduced through a variety of modes in specific spaces – narratives - verbal and written - ceremony and ritual, symbols, paintings and sculpture, poetry and dramaturgy. Together this forms the aesthetics of politics as well as of power. Second, aesthetics help us reflect upon the processes through which certain political representations become hegemonic – how the dominant modes of power are reproduced and how are the marginalised kept outside the spaces of performance of power, in the shadows, ‘out of place’. Third, it allows us to ask questions about the palimpsest of multiple histories and imaginaries – representations of power are not stable; they are contingent. Through asking these questions about the manifestations of power, its everyday presence and re-presentation, we can analyse social relations and understand how these play out in our daily lives, which is where most of us experience politics.
But of course, aesthetics does more than discipline and challenge – the claim is also that our potential to create or at least appreciate beauty makes us human. This ability gestures towards our potential for overcoming our daily condition, of rising above it. We can theorize all we like about the tethering of art in social relations, the framing of aesthetics by relations of privilege and struggles over meaning, but somewhere we carry within us the hope that art will rescue us from our condition, create new spaces, new politics by addressing our essential humanity. These essays explore these various themes and proffer insights of value in understanding aesthetics and politics in our contemporary world.
Gendered Ceremony and Ritual in Parliament
The GCRP programme (2007-2011) funded by the Leverhulme Trust, explored the importance of the symbolic and the ceremonial in politics. Spanning parliaments in three countries - India, South Africa and the UK - it explored how political institutions can be studied through not only their institutional form, but also the way a particular form takes shape – through modes of behaviour, negotiating political and physical spaces and creating an institution specific culture which socializes members in their participation. As part of this research, an interest emerged in political aesthetics, which was further explored in a workshop on The Political Aesthetics of Power and Protest at the University of Warwick. This workshop was supported by both GCRP and by the Warwick Performance and Politics Network.
